Ontology-based Route Planning for OpenStreetMap

We develop a web service for route finding in OpenStreetMap (OSM) following an activity-centred approach: the aim is not only to assist the user in travelling from A to B, but also to perform a series of specified activities along the way. This is particularly important e.g. for electric mobility, where activities can take place while the battery of the car is recharging. For specifying activities, our tool uses an ontology of spatially-located activities. This ontology then needs to be related to OSM which provides semantic metadata in form of tags. We organised the tags into another ontology (which is then connected to the first one via an ontology mapping), providing thus not only better reference for the OSM community, but also allowing to enrich the ontological semantics of the tags, to deal with their evolving nature and to extract implicit information using ontologybased data access. Moreover, we report first results on an ongoing query corpus experiment involving the OSM community targeted at improving the automated understanding of free text input for certain route finding tasks.